Brookfield Asset Management 2017 Year End Conference Call & Webcast Thursday, February 15, 2018 – 11:00 AM ET
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Brookfield Asset Management 2017 Year End Conference Call & Webcast Thursday, February 15, 2018 – 11:00 AM ET CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Suzanne Fleming Managing Partner, Branding & Communications Brian Lawson Chief Financial Officer Bruce Flatt Chief Executive Officer CONFERENCE CALL PARTICIPANTS Cherilyn Radbourne TD Securities Ann Dai KBW Mario Saric Scotiabank Andrew Kuske Credit Suisse PRESENTATION Operator Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management 2017 Year End Conference Call and Webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would like to turn the conference call over to Suzanne Fleming, Managing Partner, Branding and Communications. Please go ahead, Ms. Fleming. Suzanne Fleming, Managing Partner, Branding & Communications Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Brookfield’s 2017 year-end conference call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Lawson, our Chief Financial Officer. Brian will start off by discussing the highlights of our financial and operating results for the quarter and the year and Bruce will then give a business update. After our formal comments we’ll turn the call over to the operator and take your questions. In order to accommodate all those who would like to ask questions, we ask that you refrain from asking multiple questions at one time in order to provide an opportunity for others in the queue. We will be happy to respond to additional questions later in the call as time permits. I would like to remind you that in responding to questions and in talking about new initiatives and our financial and operating performance we may make forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. These statements reflect predictions of future events and Page 1 Brookfield Asset Management 2017 Year End Conference Call & Webcast Thursday, February 15, 2018 – 11:00 AM ET trends and do not relate to historic events. They are subject to known and unknown risks and future events may differ materially from such statements. For further information on these risks and other potential impacts on our company, please see our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the U.S., and the information available on our website. Thank you. And I’ll now turn the call over to Brian. Brian Lawson, Chief Financial Officer Thank you, Suzanne, and good morning to all of you on the call. Let me start off by saying that we are pleased with the results for 2017. In particular, it highlights a successful year of growth for our asset management franchise and a further step change increase in our earnings base. Bruce will expand on this in his remarks but, in summary, we continue to expand our fee bearing capital, generate carried interest, and deploy capital across the multiple asset classes and geographies. Funds from operations, or FFO, totaled $3.8 billion for the year. That’s a record for us. This represents $3.74 per share and an 18% increase over last year. Net income was $4.6 billion for the year or $1.34 per share attributable to shareholders. Both FFO and net income benefited from the significant increase in fee related earnings, as well as growth in our existing businesses and contributions from new investments, and they also benefited from an increase in the level of realized disposition gains and fair value gains respectively. I will now cover some of the highlights within FFO. First focusing on our asset management results – fee related earnings increased by 26% to $896 million, and that’s due to growth in fee bearing capital, which now stands at $126 billion. This growth is driven by both capital committed to new private funds and growth in the capitalization of our listed issuers. We also earned our first performance fees from BBU as a result of the significant growth in its unit price following several notable acquisitions. Moving over to carried interest, which is becoming increasingly relevant to our financial results. As our earlier vintage funds mature, they are staring to generate meaningful levels of unrealized carried interest. As we’ve noted in the past, carry doesn’t typically arise in a fund until the capital has been invested and we begin creating value, so there is a natural lag. In 2017 we generated $1.3 billion of unrealized carried interest or $928 million net of costs. Total accrued carried interest is now over $2 billion, more than double of the prior year, and while nothing is guaranteed, this provides a good indication of how we are tracking against the carried interest targets that we expect to realize over the coming years and puts us ahead of plan. The growth in fee bearing capital led to a 22% increase in annualized fees and target carried over the last year, which now stand together at $2.5 billion. Within that, annualized fees stand at $1.5 billion and add significantly to our current earning potential of the asset manager franchise while the annualized target carried interest increased to $1 billion, representing significant future earning potential. Turning to the invested capital side, FFO increased to $1.5 billion, which reflects improved results across our businesses. We benefited from strong pricing and volumes, including higher generation within our renewable power operations, increases across our transportation businesses, and higher pricing in some of our industrial businesses. We benefited from the contribution from completed development projects, which provide us with opportunities to put capital to work within our existing businesses. And we also deployed capital into a number of significant acquisitions, including $3 billion within our private equity operations and the acquisition of a $5 billion Brazilian regulated transmission business, which enabled a step change in that business as well. The strong growth in FFO per unit in Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, Renewable Energy Partners, and Property Partners supported distribution increases in each of those businesses within their 5% to 9% target ranges. Disposition gains in FFO contributed $1.3 billion, as we completed several significant sales in 2017, including the sale of our European logistics company and several core office buildings. Before I turn it over to Bruce I wanted to provide a brief update on fundraising. As you are aware, we are through 80% invested or committed on both of our flagship real estate and private equity funds and so we are currently fundraising in these sectors. Our infrastructure fund is 50% deployed, which is right on track given its vintage. And Page 2 Brookfield Asset Management 2017 Year End Conference Call & Webcast Thursday, February 15, 2018 – 11:00 AM ET in 2017, while we didn’t hold final closes for any of our larger flagship funds, we made very good progress in building out our other strategies such as our credit business. We raised our first infrastructure credit fund, which exceeded the target size, and held a first close on an open-ended real estate credit fund. With interest rates still expected to be very low compared to the returns we can generate, we continue to see demand in the foreseeable future for products which are alternative to fixed income investments. We are pleased with our initial progress in the high net worth space, where we’ve raised over $400 million since the beginning of 2017 through multiple channels, including private banks and registered investment advisors. Going forward, we planned to offer more of our products to clients in this channel and expect it to be a good area of growth for us. Finally, I’m pleased to confirm that our board of directors has declared a $0.15 quarterly dividend payable at the end of February and this represents a 7% increase over the prior year. And, with that, I will hand the call over to Bruce. Thank you. Bruce Flatt, Chief Executive Officer Thank you all for joining the call. As Brian mentioned, assets under management continue to grow and our investments performed well last year. We continue to find opportunities to invest the capital that we’ve been raising despite a competitive environment and we put that down to three of our core advantages, which are size, our global presence, and our operating platforms. These advantages allow us not only to identify a wide range of investment opportunities globally but also to acquire assets for value and then use our operating businesses to create upside. With strong markets, as Brian mentioned, we sold a number of assets, more than usual, and we will continue to do so in 2018. Our strategy has been twofold – first, to sell mature stabilized assets and redeploy the proceeds into higher yielding assets or, secondly, into returning capital to investors, particularly when this allows us to substantially complete a defined investment strategy. Fundraising for real assets in both the public and the private markets for the assets that we manage remains strong, with institutional funds continuing to allocate greater amounts of capital to these sectors. With interest rates expected to remain in a low range compared to the returns that we can generate, and I’ll return to that in a second, this growth should continue for the foreseeable future. Turning to general markets, we see no signs of underlying economic issues despite the U.S.